Contents
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Dedication
Quote
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Two
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
First published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2013
Copyright © Gene Doucette, 2013
The right of Gene Doucette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
This work is copyrighted. All rights are reserved. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Writer’s Coffee Shop
(Australia) PO Box 447 Cherrybrook NSW 2126
(USA) PO Box 2116 Waxahachie TX 75168
Paperback ISBN- 978-1-61213-147-4
E-book ISBN- 978-1-61213-148-1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the US Congress Library.
Cover image by: © Depositphotos/Sergej Razvodovskij and © Depositphotos/parfta
Cover design by: Megan Dooley
www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/gdoucette
About the Author
Gene Doucette has been published as a humorist with Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father and The Other Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody. Other novels by Gene Doucette include Immortal and Hellenic Immortal. He is also a screenwriter and a playwright. Gene lives in Cambridge MA with his wife and two children.
For Deb, who has always liked Corrigan the best.
‘What ails you, Polyphemus,’ said they, ‘that you make such a noise, breaking the stillness of the night, and preventing us from being able to sleep? Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? Surely no man is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force?’
“But Polyphemus shouted to them from inside the cave, ‘No man is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force.’ ”
—Homer, The Odyssey
Translated by Samuel Butler 1900
PART ONE
GHOSTS
Chapter One
Now
Melissa didn’t know what she was thinking when she stepped off the curb, but she knew where she was looking—to the right, which was the wrong way entirely. The curb was on North Street at the edge of Faneuil Hall, roughly ten feet from the junction of North and Clinton Streets, and Clinton was a one-way feeding into North, so it was possible Melissa looked to her right because a moment earlier—had she crossed at Clinton—that would have been an intelligent thing to do.
She also might have been looking that way because John was in that approximate direction. She’d just had lunch with John, he had just asked her out and she had just said yes, and this was just about the best thing that had happened to her since she’d moved to Boston.
It might also have been that Melissa had finally reached the point as a Bostonian where she no longer paid attention to traffic. Pedestrians downtown tended to show the same concern about fast-moving cars as they might have for slow-moving cattle, but for her first month in town Melissa had obeyed the crosswalks like she was raised to. Sometime around the second month she gave up on that. Month number three appeared to be the month where she threw herself in front of a minivan.
And so on a fine, bright and sunny Thursday afternoon, looking the wrong way and perhaps thinking of John rather than the traffic, Melissa stepped off the curb at the same time the driver of a minivan that was about to occupy that exact same space was looking down at a map. The driver was a tourist, and he was lost.
This was another thing that happened routinely in downtown Boston because none of the streets made sense, most of them were one-way, and one or two had a tendency to disappear entirely for extended stretches without any adequate explanation. The driver had been looking for one of those streets, which was supposed to lead him and his wife—she with the map thrust before his eyes at exactly the wrong moment—to the aquarium.
Melissa didn’t hear the minivan’s approach. The first indication she had that something was amiss was a heavy hand clamping down on her shoulder. Before this really registered, she was being picked up and thrown back onto the sidewalk. She landed hard and banged her elbow and was about to scream out at whoever had just picked her up and thrown her when she heard the screech of the tires and saw a shoe that looked exactly like the one she had just been wearing fly down the street.
I was just hit by a car, she thought.
But that couldn’t be right. If she was hit by a car she would still be attached to the shoe, lying someplace entirely different, and probably not capable of recognizing that she’d been hit by anything.
Then her left ankle—the one above her unshod foot—screamed at her, and she wondered if she had just broken it.
A large man was kneeling over her, looking concerned. She didn’t know him, but he looked like the guy you warn children to stay away from. Despite that, she was pretty sure he had just saved her life.
“You okay?” he asked.
“How did you . . . do that?” she asked. “Where did you come from?”
“Sorry I’m late,” the man said. “Traffic was pretty rough.”
“Late? What are you talking about? Who are you?”
“Corrigan Bain,” he said, smiling and extending his hand. Interestingly, when he smiled, his grim features—he was not, by most standards, a particularly handsome man—transformed him into something strangely gentle and trustworthy.
“Oh, I’m a fixer,” he added, as if this explained everything. “Again, sorry I’m late. Your foot might be broken.”
“I don’t understand . . .” He still had his hand out, meaning to help her up, but she was pretty happy where she was; she was almost positive if she stood she’d just fall right over again.
“Hey!” a familiar voice shouted from half a street away. It was John. He had been across Clinton when he heard the minivan’s tires screeching, which made him turn back and look for Melissa. When he saw her on the ground, he didn’t associate what he was seeing with the sound that had made him turn in the first place. He saw what looked like a big ugly guy attacking his girlfriend.
Melissa didn’t say anything at first because seeing John rush over to defend her made her unaccountably happy. And then John sort of embarrassed himself.
He charged Corrigan Bain, but somehow Bain reacted preemptively to John’s clumsy assault by shifting his weight in just such a way that John’s ostensibly violent shove didn’t move him at all.
John stumbled backward and then tried again. This time Corrigan stepped to one side at the last moment, and John fell on his face. It reminded Melissa of a movie ninja, except Bain wasn’t doing anything special other than moving at
exactly the right time.
“John,” Melissa tried, but he wasn’t hearing her.
“All right, buddy,” John said, holding up his fists.
Corrigan Bain looked confused, like someone who was watching a foreign film with the wrong translation. He looked past John and up the street—there wasn’t anything special going on up the street—then down at Melissa. He started to thank her for some reason, and then John swung at him.
Bain pulled away just in time to miss getting punched, and finally Melissa found her voice. “John!” she shouted. “Will you stop? He saved my life.”
John looked down at her like he just realized she was there. “He what?”
And then Corrigan Bain was gone. Melissa was about to apologize for John, but Bain had disappeared. And up the street, where she’d seen him look, two police officers were now running toward them.
“He saved my life,” she repeated to John. “Now would you go get my shoe please?”
* * *
It was the crowd that was the problem. Corrigan couldn’t stand crowds, but not because of any kind of low-level agoraphobia or even a personal space problem. It was that entirely too many things could go wrong in a crowd. Sometimes even figuring out whom you were there to save was a bigger challenge than the actual saving.
As he worked through the very kind of crowd he found so disconcerting, he glanced back over his shoulder for one last look at the scene. The cops he’d been expecting had arrived, and it didn’t appear as if either of them were looking for him, which was good.
Thankfully, the girl he’d saved wasn’t a fainter.
Having police turn up at a scene vastly complicated everything in Corrigan’s life, so he did everything he could to avoid them. And since doing everything he could usually meant knowing where they were going to be before they did, it wasn’t all that difficult.
Again, provided there wasn’t a crowd.
Ahead of Corrigan loomed a large stone staircase that led up past city hall and to where he had parked his bike. The people on the steps were a wormy cascade of fuzzy twists and turns, a torrent of possible selves. It was breathtaking and terrifying and very, very difficult to handle because the question of how much of it was real was open to interpretation from moment to moment. Corrigan had to resist the urge to simply close his eyes, kneel down where he was, and wait for everyone to go away.
Instead, he looked down at his feet and charged up the steps. The human spaghetti strands of eventualities adjusted as he moved through, his present causing everyone else’s future to adjust and recalibrate. He’d nearly reached the top when he saw the boy.
The kid was only five or six. He stood alone at the top of the steps, watching Corrigan, and he was impossible not to notice because he had no future. Because he wasn’t really there.
“It wasn’t that close,” Corrigan muttered quietly. “Leave me alone.”
The boy didn’t answer. He never answered when they were in public. He just looked at him angrily and then turned around and walked away.
A little singsong phrase popped into Corrigan’s head, the kind of thought meme that reappears when you least want to hear it and refuses to go away no matter what you try and replace it with. He didn’t know where it came from or who invented it, or if he might have invented it himself.
Corrigan Bain is going insane.
* * *
In order to reach Faneuil Hall in time, Corrigan had been forced to park his motorcycle in a nontraditional space—the sidewalk next to a parking meter across from City Hall Plaza. It was either that or steer the motorcycle down the steps, which he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to get away with. It went without saying that parking illegally right between city hall and the courthouse—and a stone’s throw from the downtown police station—would attract a parking ticket. So he was surprised to find a redhead on his bike in lieu of any sort of citation. He shook his head to see if that made her go away, but she appeared to be real.
“Maggie?” he said. “Is that you? I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Hey, yourself.” She smiled and slid off the seat of his bike. “And go to hell, I haven’t changed that much. How long’s it been?”
Maggie Trent was indeed looking as sharp as she ever did in a blue pants suit and a decent pair of heels that seemed practical only in the sense that they went well with the suit. She had on her customary dark glasses and a cigarette dangling from her lips. What had thrown him was the hair. She had magnificent hair—currently of the copper-red variety—but had chosen to pull it back past her ears to terminate in some sort of complex Gordian knot at the base of her neck. It was extremely unflattering, but that was probably the idea.
“It’s been three, four years at least,” he insisted.
“Two years. We saw each other at the mayor’s thing. You were with what’s-her-name.”
“Right.” He’d have provided the name of his date to flesh out the details, but the truth was he couldn’t remember it either.
“Never did tell me how you got invited to that,” she added while extending the pack of cigarettes. He slid one out of the box. Corrigan was not a full-time smoker but always took one when it was offered.
“I helped out a guy who knew a guy who had an extra pair of tickets. Dunno why I actually went, though. Wasn’t my sort of thing.”
“No, it wasn’t. Bet it impressed the girl.”
Corrigan leaned forward into the flame from her extended lighter, puffed the cigarette to life, and ignored the tinge of jealousy that was lacing Maggie’s comment regarding his nameless date from two years ago.
“Not as much as you might think,” he said. “So how did you come to be sitting on my bike?”
She laughed. “Seriously? Look where you are.”
He did. Without even realizing it, he’d gone and parked the bike directly in front of Center Plaza; a broad crescent-shaped building that blocked the view of Middlesex courthouse from City Hall like a medieval battlement. The FBI Boston office was in Center Plaza, and had been for years. One could not find this out by looking at the building directory, but that didn’t make it any less true.
“Huh,” he said expressively.
“It’s enough to make a girl think you’re looking for ways to run into her.” She grinned. Not knowing how to respond to this, he simply smiled back and worked on his smoke some more. “You on duty?” she asked.
“Just finished my day,” he said.
“Everybody make it okay?”
“It was close, but yeah. Crowd.”
She nodded, as nothing more needed saying. Anyone who’d spent a little time with Corrigan knew to keep him away from crowds.
“So,” she said. “Down to business.”
“We have business?”
“We certainly do. You owe me a drink.”
“Do I.”
“Perhaps even dinner. You eat yet?”
“Never found time.” He had briefly toyed with the idea of picking up something in Faneuil Hall but figured he wouldn’t be able to handle the mob indoors any better than he did the one outdoors.
“Good,” she said. “I’m hungry, too.”
“Dinner’s quite a commitment,” he said, the word choice being entirely deliberate.
“I’m sure we can handle it. Just in case, we’ll hold off on dessert until we’re sure.”
“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “Not that I’m backing out, but can you tell me when I came to owe you dinner?”
“You see your bike?”
“Yeah.”
“How about the parking ticket?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Exactly. Now let’s eat.”
* * *
Ten minutes later Maggie and Corrigan had taken up a corner booth in a small, moderately popular Irish pub in the crescent, no more than fifty feet from his bike. The place was only lightly populated, as the truly busy time—when it would be packed right up to the fire code limit—was a good hour or two away. Corrig
an sipped from his pint of home-brewed ale, one of the pub’s specialties and quite good if one were an aficionado of beer, as he was. Less accomplished beer drinkers might deem it a tad bitter.
“So, when I last saw you, you were dating this banker . . . what was his name? Larry?”
“Gerry,” Maggie corrected, sipping from her own glass.
“How’d that work out for you?”
“Turned out Gerry was a bit of a dick. Wasted a year finding that out.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you aren’t.” She smiled back with a flirty little tilt of her head.
“Fine. I’m not.”
“How about you?”
“Free as ever,” he said. “You know how it is; hard to really develop anything long-term with my work schedule.”
This was a true but incomplete response. More accurately, there were a number of women who floated in and out of his life, much as Maggie did. Each of them was passively aware that there were others, in the same way one is passively aware of one’s own shadow. But what they all had in common, aside from a willingness to occasionally jump into bed with Corrigan, was a lack of possessiveness coupled with indifference toward long-term romantic entanglements.
“What you need, my dear, is a vacation,” Maggie said.
“I get days off.”
“And you spend them at home drinking beer.”
“Works for me.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
This temporarily brought the conversation to a halt, veering dangerously close to the subject of their last serious conversation, which had, in truth, been a volcanic argument that teetered on the edge of physical violence several times. The thesis had been that Corrigan Bain had it within his power to stop fixing at any time. And as he had plenty to retire on—and often complained that he didn’t even like saving people every damn day, every damn year—the only reason he wouldn’t quit was because he was a stubborn bastard. Maggie, for some reason, had taken his stubbornness very personally.
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